Thursday, February 9, 2012

Slight case of writer's block

I don't know if it's the winter blues, the fact that these days I'm a one-game gamer and it ain't EVE, or because of spending 2.5 days at the hospital followed by sleeping on the couch because I had the two tornadoes over the weekend, but these days my writing ideas are making themselves scarce. Sometimes I have an inspiration but I'm too busy to write about it when it's fresh, and when I do find time I find myself looking at my WordPad window and don't know which word to put in front of which.

At first I was feeling like writing a debriefing on 4 years of EVE Online, especially since I've dug up some ancient screenshots literally from Day One (OK, six days old!) but the words were getting all jumbled. Screenshots such as this one:

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Me in Rifter, Letrange in Firetail. Also check out my awesome fit !!!

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Yep, this is Letrange giving me EVE 101 on January 26th 2008, on the old "classic" client. Crazy how time flies. Back then EVE still had that shiny veneer and that new car smell. I had ideas about the game that I realize today were not only extremely noobish but also all wrong. Ah EVE, the Harsh Mistress. And then there was this one:

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WTF is that pointy ship? Is this a real player or not? What's my name again?!

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Yep, three weeks old and flying in Curse. And yes, my first ever BOZO op wasn't even for PvP, but I remember quite clearly that at the time I didn't know what the fuck was going on! To put it on the "learning cliff" scale, I was getting close to the vertical part and I suddenly caught a glimpse of feet dangling; these feet belonging to players who had hung themselves on the mighty overhang of course!

But even all that good nostalgia is not enough to reconcile me with what I see now as a massive capitalism sim. The veneer isn't only gone; the paint is rusting and the bumpers are falling off. And the smell... God Almighty! Because of its harsh nature and its grief-happy mechanics, the EVE community has a way to attract an obscene amount of trolls. The only reason why I've been on the forums in the past 5 months was to update the Montreal EVE Meet thread; if I read only a tiny part of General Discussions I end up wanting to punch someone after about 2 minutes, and I'll spare you what I think of C&P and CAOD. And as an alternative, FailHeapChallenge is even worse. The only place to find something positive about EVE, to me at least, is through the Blogosphere. Blogs seem to seperate adults from pubescents. I don't think I would have lasted this long in EVE if it wasn't for the intereaction of at least some fine people, and for this I salute you all, bloggers of EVE Online!

But my writer's block isn't only about EVE. As you may have noticed on the right-hand side I've started writing a second blog on The Skyrim Blog. It's my first foray into an in-character story but right after Chapter One I had to rush my boy to the hospital and since coming back the blank page syndrome is even worse. Methinks I need to shut off and reset my brain for a bit.

And that's about it for now. Fly safe or hard, carebear or ganky, whatever floats your boat!

o7

Edit: I forgot to mention, the number one sport in EVE Online, ship spinning, is now free on eveonline.com, removing yet another reason to resub XD